When Australian filmmaker Robert Connolly directs a feature film, audiences pay attention. His latest is The Dry, and this thriller doesn’t disappoint. Based on Jane Harper’s novel of the same title, The Dry powerfully depicts a community in crisis. Connolly’s previous feature, Paper Planes (2014) proved a surprise hit, and there’s no reason The Dry…
The ancient and modern worlds collide in the special effects action blockbuster Monster Hunter. Based on a video game series of the same name, the plot – such that it is – is basically inconsequential. It’s merely an excuse for non-stop fighting and a legion of monsters to test and retest the limits of human…
Cinema, like any art form, has boundless capacity to surprise. Disney-Pixar has struggled a little recently (see Onward, for example). But the studio reclaims its title as the benchmark in animation with the incredible Soul. I suspect the success of Soul has a lot to do with the return of Pete Docter to the director’s…
The truth, they say, can be stranger than fiction. In Lydia Dean Pilcher’s A Call to Spy, the true story of remarkable women spies might not be all that strange, but it is powerful. Virginia Hall is sometimes touted as America’s first woman spy. While the title might not be entirely accurate, she was one…
The idea that the collective is stronger than the individual underpins The Croods 2: A New Age. This is of course the sequel to the successful animated film The Croods (2013). The story picks up when young Guy (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) is left to fend for himself. His loved ones’ last words to him…
A gay Sliding Doors with subtitles? End of the Century is essentially a two-handed drama which serves up a meditation on relationships, the choices we make, and the fallibility of memory. Ocho (Juan Barberini), a fortysomething Argentine poet from New York on holiday in Barcelona, meets Javi (Ramon Pujol), a Berlin-based producer of a children’s…
French cinematic touchstones and a powerful feminist message merge in Martin Provost’s How to be a Good Wife. This slightly bonkers film traverses similar ground to Philippa Lowthorpe’s Misbehaviour, and does it with a similarly entertaining flair. But it also leans heavily into the traditions of French farce. Provost’s previous film was the far more…
Wonder Woman (2017) was one of the best films in the expanded DC cinematic universe. The sequel, Wonder Woman 1984 (or WW84 if you prefer), is one of the first blockbusters to welcome cinema audiences back the pandemic-related lockdowns. So there’s a lot riding on it to be a success. Unfortunately, as is the case…
I can’t think of an actress who has epitomised class, style and magnetism more than the late, great Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993). The documentary Audrey charts her life’s course. Notwithstanding remarkable and well-deserved success, there was also much pain and sadness. She was just a young girl when her parents split and war broke…
The Nightingale (2018) rewrote the rules around brutal representations of Australia’s colonial past. Now The Furnace follows in its footsteps, albeit less successfully. In remote Western Australia circa 1897, a young Afghani cameleer, Hanif (Ahmed Malek), is determined to escape the outback and return home. Hanif has witnessed a white man murder his mentor. Now…
